VREB Safe Attachment Policy

To help safeguard the VREB office network, email received at the VREB is subject to this Safe Attachment Policy.

Messages with attachments that could contain executable code are automatically redirected to technical staff, who will manually check such attachments for viruses and malware.  If cleared, technical staff will forward such messages to their intended VREB recipients.  Messages found to contain infected attachments will be deemed to be malicious and will be destroyed.

The most common, potentially unsafe attachments that we receive are those of the following file types:

.DOC  .XLS  .PPT  .HTM  .HTML  .ZIP  .EXE

Here are some suggestions to help you avoid the delay necessitated by the checking of these attachment types:

• many documents types can be easily saved as type .PDF, which we deem to be safe under this policy

• save your Microsoft Office documents as their modern, safe equivalents:

save .DOC Word documents as type .DOCX
save .XLS Excel spreadsheets as type .XLSX
save .PPT Powerpoint presentations as type .PPTX

If you have a question about safe attachments or if you need assistance converting your attachments, please contact your VREB correspondent or our technical staff for assistance.

If you are unable to convert potentially unsafe file types, be sure to allow extra time for their receipt by your intented VREB recipient.  We suggest:

• sending your message with attachments during the business day

• sending a follow-up message without attachments to your intended VREB recipient, advising that you've sent a separate message with attachments that will need to be cleared by our technical staff

Thank you for helping us practise safe computing.